From their youngest days, students will be exposed to a plethora of information, some good, some bad, some pointless.

And then there is information that is so important, so useful, that children are exposed to it all day, every day. Yet they never really notice. I am refering to the Useful Information charts that appear on the backs or insides of composition notebooks.

Although most of the tables and charts show math-related data — Multiplication Tables, Metric Conversion Tables, etc., — there are some differences between charts and occasionally some truly obscure gold.

In this six-part series, I will compare different Useful Information charts and try to find unique features and otherwise uncommon nuggets of info.

I just finished six weeks of SWAT — Students Will Ace Testing — in preparation for the New York State mathematics test. Everyday in one of two schools, working one-on-one with targeted students. We focused on particular math topics that were discovered to be the most common topics on the tests for the past five years. I hope the students that I worked with did well.